Holed up in Amsterdam, Tom Six talks about what's really making him sick.
Plus IconOwen Gleiberman
Chief Film Critic
@OwenGleiberman See All
Courtesy of Tom Six Yesterday’s punk, grunge, and rebel-outsider upstarts have an uncanny way of evolving into today’s elder statesmen of respectable infamy. (Hello, John Waters, Patti Smith, John Lydon, Henry Rollins, and Robin Byrd.) But it’s doubtful that Tom Six will ever be in the mix of latter-day prestige. His desire to stand apart from it is too great.
In case he’s not on your radar, Tom Six is the Dutch director of the “Human Centipede” trilogy, a series of horror films so grotesque that the idea of sitting through them would be a deal-breaker for 97 percent of moviegoers. Six was after the other three percent: the kind who feed off shock and transgression, and who recognize that a horror movie that makes hardened veterans of the genre feel like they have to watch parts of it peeking between their fingers is either a movie that has gone too far…or one that’s the definition of what true horror is. The “Human Centipede” films — especially “The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence),” a hellacious “Götterdämmerung” of torture porn — were both.
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